The Firebrand
by Laryna6
Summary: A knight in shining armor rescues a princess. Except the princess is the dragon, and the metaphor breaks along with Sigma's mind. A fractured family dreams of a happily ever after, or at least an after the war. Fem!Zero AU, not X/Zero.
1. Chapter 1

_Yes, I know the 'what if Zero was female' premise has been done. Of course, keep in mind that Zero is an android, not a human, so he's not male in the games and she won't technically be female in this fic. It's just a question of appearances, and that is how this will treat it._

_Being referred to by a different pronoun isn't going to change who a person is. It will, however, change how they're perceived and the kind of peer pressure they get hit with._

_In other words, what effect will Zero being referred to as female have on the wars? Zip, zero, nada, nothing. It's not something that will change whether or not she wins or loses any battles. A pronoun is not going to alter her power level._

_It will, however, change the 'human' side of the wars. The barracks gossip. Public opinion of why Sigma is trying so hard to get Zero to join him. For instance, in the Day of Sigma OVA, it's pretty clear that Zero admires Sigma and believes in him, enough to try to justify early questionable behavior by spending tons of time in shooting simulations to prove him right. If Zero were female, people would assume that was a crush, the Rescue Romance trope in action. Or gossips would, anyway. And say female!Zero is hanging out with Iris and Colonel a lot and sparring with Colonel. Which one would people assume she'd fallen for?_

_Then there's the fact that gender roles do affect how humans think, culturally and otherwise. Dr. Wily would have had to have at least a slightly different concept of Zero in order to build it as a female model. (The virus works well with the Hive Queen trope.)_

_The ripple effects of all this interested me, when I was scheming it all out in my head, and what really interested me was how many of those ripples cancelled each other out. I was planning to write a serious fic, and wrote a series of scenes, but they ended up somewhat random and the Zero clone from X2 wandered in... So this is not a serious examination of the concept, but it's not a crack fic, either. Or a happy fic. Or X/Zero. It's a weird little thing. You have been warned._

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><p>There was a large cracked area here: the materials composing the armor had failed, clearly, most likely due to some internal flaw in the alloy. They needed to develop a better method of scanning for those: this reploid had been built by a factory that was very solidly committed to reploid safety, which was why they donated to the Hunters. X knew their material check protocols, they would have caught anything obvious.<p>

Of course, Irregular Hunter armor had to have some scan resistance, it was a side effect of energy and energy weapon resistance in general. It was possible that they wouldn't be able to do anything about this problem with current technology.

Well, at least they knew that it existed, that hidden subtle flaws could exist in this alloy. It could be added to the huge to-do list of things that needed something done about them.

Of flaws X didn't have that killed reploids.

He needed to figure out exactly how much force had been applied to crack the armor, that would give them some idea of what was getting through quality checks undetected and how dangerous it was…

His train of thought was interrupted by someone shaking his shoulder, albeit gently. "What?"

"Sorry, Dr. Light. I tried saying your name, but you didn't respond," the orderly said.

"That was my fault, I had my auditory systems offline so I could concentrate." And to conserve power.

It was going to be a long night.

"You asked us to tell you if either of them regained consciousness."

"Yes, that's right." He started to reset his optics from magnification and spectroscopic analysis back to normal vision so that he could focus on the orderly's expression. "Which one?"

"The mechanaloid."

"I'll be right there." He started to put his tools down on the tray and pull the sheet over the body of the hunter he'd been autopsying.

"Please hurry, Dr. It escaped from its restraints…"

X took off running, pulling the orderly along long enough for him to start running himself. "Did anyone attack it?"

"No, Dr. Cain left standing orders not to provoke either of them, and so far it hasn't even tried to escape from the sealed room." The room with very, very thick armored walls that they used to imprison irregulars whose mental problems they hadn't been able to fix yet, the kind that might flip out and start shooting, or try to run through a wall during panic attack, or any of a large number of things. "It just woke up, got out of the restraints, we aren't sure _how_, went over to check on the other one and then curled up next to her."

"That's promising. At least it wasn't insane enough to attack her." If only they'd had a second secure room… They'd never needed more than one before, though, and this was anything but a normal case. "That might help narrow down which of them malfunctioned. Unless the problem was in the merge software or hardware. Or the friend/foe recognition system, in which case it might still attack any reploid that isn't its owner. Did it react to the people beyond the viewing window?"

"No, it looked at us, but it didn't seem interested." Thank goodness.

He sighed with relief. "_Very _promising."

"Why would you say that, Dr. Light?"

"We've had rogue mechanaloids, but since they can't be reprogrammed," no reploid-derived technology could be, not on the quasi-personality level (upgrades and new functions aside), "or repaired and reasoned with so they can change their own programming, then if they have a mental bug there's no option but destroying them. She's going to be upset enough when she wakes up and remembers what happened without finding out that we had to put down her support unit."

"Support unit?"

"Well, what else would you call a non-sentient unit that merges with a sentient one?" Thank goodness, they were finally here.

"Wouldn't it be better if we could tell her that it wasn't her fault?"

X sighed as he sat down and entered his password into the main console. "It doesn't matter where the glitch was. It wasn't her fault, it was the glitch's, but it was still her body that was out there. If she blames herself for the deaths, trying to pin the blame on her support unit won't stop her." And she was going to need emotional support. Wait. "Sigma?" He blinked at the figure in the corner of the dimly lit observation room. "Are you still up?"

"Dr. Cain patched me up." Sigma waved aside his concern.

"You need to get some sleep."

"I recharged while I was in surgery."

"That's not the same thing," X repeated for the umpteenth time. Sigma never would learn not to push himself when he was worried about other people, but that was just how he was.

"At the end, she hesitated to finish me off. I want to be here so that she can see I'm alright, or if there's anything else I can do." Sigma shrugged, looking to the side.

"…Good thinking," X had to admit. There had been enough death: the rooms full of bodies waiting for autopsy were proof of that. Being shown that at least she'd managed to spare _someone_ might make the difference between life and death.

The ability reploids had to control their personalities meant that guilt-induced suicide was a very valid fear in any case where a newbuilt injured someone while they weren't in their right minds, let alone _this _case. Self-loathing itself could be fatal, since they could wipe the personality they hated and just die.

"In that case, you can stay, but at least go into sleep mode? I'll wake you if she starts to wake up."

"I'll be fine."

X sighed. "Please, Sigma?" The general had just failed to save two units of hunters and hundreds of innocents. Was he trying to avoid sleep to avoid nightmares? Nevertheless, he had to sleep to begin to deal with all of this.

"…Alright, if it will keep you from throwing me out. And I don't want anyone to go in there unless I'm awake." _That _was an order. As head of the Irregular Hunters, he might not be able to overrule doctor's orders, but safety concerns were his department.

"Well, you might as well stay awake for a few more minutes, then. I want to see if the mechanaloid is aggressive when there are people present in the room with it, instead of behind a buster-proof window, and see if I can get it to move. We're lucky it didn't pull out any of the sensor wires." That they were using to get readings from the irregular's systems, or trying to, at least. "If it's docile, then I want to see if I can get it into surgery and examine it. Its anti-scan defenses might be weaker than hers are, and we need to crack them so we can get some information on her systems."

"They might actually be stronger. It's the armor unit, after all."

"Meaning it may run additional self-defense systems, meant to link into hers, since my armor contains many of mine." X grimaced. "I know, but it's worth a try. I'd like to be able to fix this before she wakes up." Her system was currently in some form of hibernation, but her anti-hacking defenses were too powerful for her to be sedated, and the last thing they wanted to do was scramble her self-repair protocols, in hopes they fixed whatever glitch this was on their own. "If your description of the fight was correct, then the glitch might have been in the merge system, since it was when you smashed that crystal that they de-merged and were knocked out. I didn't think that it was possible for reploids to use support units, with our mental defenses."

"So if she never merges again, she'll be fine?"

"The one thing we _do _know for certain is that there's extensive mental damage." Since scans didn't work, they'd had to manually insert a camera probe into her central processor. "Dr. Cain installed an additional regulation chip: that should take some of the load off of her systems, once they configure it to her settings," how soon would she be able to do that? If she'd been designed to merge with and control another system? "The central processor chaos might clear up on its own, it might have been the problem in the first place…" X shrugged.

"And then there's the shock of what happened. Will she remember it?"

"Her memory center is completely scrambled – Didn't Dr. Cain go over this with you?"

"I wanted a second opinion."

Oh? It was like Sigma to be concerned for the poor irregulars, even one that had killed his people, but was that more concern than usual?

"Don't tell me you're thinking what Cain was. She's a poor, traumatized newbuilt, and she's not out of the woods yet. Of course I'm concerned."

"If you say so." She _was _rather pretty… wouldn't it be nice if something happy came out of all this?

Sigma growled under his breath. "Not you too."

"I didn't say anything."

"I know what you're thinking. You're the one who read those fairy tales, _Mother_." Despite the reminiscence and joke, Sigma sounded genuinely… not quite angry or disgusted with X, but somewhere around there.

Right, after so many deaths, Sigma would _not _be in the mood for comments about noble knights and damsels in distress. "Let's just focus on getting her better," X said, making a mental note to tell Dr. Cain to knock it off.

"That should be obvious, _Sleeping Beauty_." The fact that X even had to say what should be the obvious priority? Sigma didn't stomp off, but it was clear that he was angry now. Well, he needed someone to be angry at, irrational as it was, after all those people had died. Better X than Sigma himself or the poor irregular.

Dr. Cain might have encouraged that by needling him a bit, since Sigma obviously needed to let it out, but X wasn't like that, so he just kept working and gave Sigma some time to cool down. Obviously it had been foolish for Dr. Cain to tease him when he was so upset, and Dr. Cain must have for him to react so quickly and strongly to X's thoughts. Unless Dr. Cain had just struck a nerve?

The female irregular was quite well-designed, aesthetically. The proponents of a new, reploid standard of beauty wouldn't have approved, of course. Due to the larger sizes of modern parts, and the additional parts reploids needed to try to mimic some of X's functions, trying to appear realistically human wasn't always practical. Forget adding in better armor and weapon systems. They looked too big and bulky: Sigma after his upgrades was a prime example of the problems with that design philosophy, which was why most of the commanders were opting for animal-based forms. It wasn't like they needed to look like humans in order to be regarded as equals by them.

She was larger than X, but not built to Sigma's scale. The female form might have been chosen for practical reasons as well as aesthetic ones, actually, given the proportions of certain areas. Of course she was only anatomically accurate in broad strokes: they would have had to worry that she'd been sexually abused and attacked her builder because of it if she'd had actual pseudo-organs. No, she could pass for a human female while she was wearing clothing, if X was any judge, but the lack of hair and flaws, not to mention a belly button or… other things related to human reproduction and childcare made it fairly obvious that she wasn't human. Even looking closely at her face revealed there were no pores or other such things. She was almost like one of those art deco statuettes, really. Except for the fact that she was an illegal deadly weapon, and the fact she'd clearly been built to be able to go stealth just made it worse.

Mingle with the crowd in a populated area, teleport on her armor when it was time to attack… theoretically, _X _could do that, but it wasn't like he'd been designed for warfare. Dr. Light had just been, well, a little paranoid, between Dr. Wily and the state of the robot rights movement in 20XX. X hadn't been designed for combat, but he had an amount of self-defense capability that was a little scary when he thought about it.

Though if it weren't for the fact that he was X _Light_, brother of Megaman, and everyone knew why Dr. Light would have built him that way, other people might have had a problem with it. As it was, reploids with built-in firearms had to have them registered, just like humans with firearms did. Someone custom-building this powerful (and expensive, couldn't forget that) a reploid without telling anyone? Had she been intended for assassination, bank robberies, or both? Have the stealth gear in the humanoid form, build in such powerful anti-scan defenses so that she could fool metal detectors, and all she would have had to do was get out of sight, demerge from her armor unit, and summon it later. Maybe have it lead them on a wild goose chase until she was clear.

Frankly, they'd almost been lucky she'd been utterly insane during the rampage, and Sigma must know this if X did. She could have done a _lot _more damage if she'd been intelligent enough to use her true capabilities, at least until they figured out how she kept suddenly going off their radar until she turned up in a new area that hadn't been evacuated yet.

"I'm going in," X told the orderly, after he had set everything up, both in the building's systems and his own systems.

"Good luck, Dr. Light."

Sigma looked like he would prefer to be the one to go in, but the sad truth was that even after he'd been upgraded into that bulky (X was too nice to call it ogre-like) body, he still didn't have armor as good as X's. Not to mention that it would have been a little hard for him to dodge, in that small a room, or use a beam saber effectively. X's copy buster allowed him to use a stun setting.

The vaguely catlike support unit turned its head to the door when he slid it open, but didn't react aggressively. He opened it only as far as he needed to and closed it again quickly, but it didn't show any signs of wanting to leave the side of its… owner? Partner? Much less escape. X stepped closer slowly, not making any sudden movements, and held a hand out to it, just a few inches in front of its muzzle, palm down and fingers curled in a bit _below _the level of its muzzle. That was how you introduced yourself to dogs and cats, since it was a bad idea to look like you were going to try to grab a skittish animal.

The mechanaloid leaned forward a bit to sniff his hand – wow, the builder really had put a great deal of work into this project – then licked, and looked up at him thoughtfully.

Before, X had thought it might be something of a dumb animal/primitive AI, from the way it didn't react to things it might not have been programmed to care about or know how to handle, but when their eyes met it was clear that there was _some _kind of intelligence there, even if not a human-level one. One that was capable of making friend/foe judgments, at the very minimum.

That sharpness disappeared after a few seconds, and then it lowered its head to lick again at his hand, purring. "Good boy," X said, because of how low the rumbling sound was. "What's your name?" There were what could be stylized Zs on the shoulderpads of the armor that had become the shoulders of the animal mechanaloid. "You're definitely not a zebra…"

The snort of disdain was another hint this might actually be fairly intelligent. "Can you understand what I'm saying?"

The big cat merely yawned and lay back down, curling up again.

"Your…" Master might be insulting, "Your friend is sick. We're trying to fix her. Is there anything that you know that might help her get better?"

Apparently not. Or it wasn't going to tell him.

Well, it was worth a try. They'd examined the support unit as well: it had a fairly large total of processor space, spread throughout its body/her armor in smallish nodes, so its intelligence level was anyone's guess. The armor and merge systems might have used up almost all that processing capacity on their own.

He pet it carefully, and when it allowed that liberty tried to get a look at a paw. They still needed to figure out how it had gotten loose from the restraints.

Sadly, the cat was as inscrutable as the legendary sphinx.


	2. Chapter 2

_So, after I had the initial bunny, I wrote short scenes and such. I think it went off the rails in the one after this, but I blame a certain person in this bit for that._

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><p>Even though X had quit the medical department and become a field hunter, he still ended up haunting their break room.<p>

"He's still not talking to me outside of orders and digs at my performance."

"Don't worry, X." Dr. Cain leaned forward in his chair to pat X's arm. "Sigma has to forgive you sometime."

"Ha. I have only been here a month, and I can tell you that will happen when hell freezes over." Dr. Alba, who normally didn't socialize much during break, was nursing his second energy drink. "I come here to get practice in trauma medicine _before _going into research, so I can gain an understanding of what the problems with reploid design are, that was spelled out clearly on my resume, and what do I get assigned to? Upgrades, upgrades, all the time it's commanders wanting upgrades! It would be enough to make me tear my hair out if I had any! And then I get complaints that the armor is too heavy, and I say I just gave them what they asked for, and they say Dr. Light would have known that what they suggested wasn't practical and come up with something, and I am not Dr. Light! Either of them!" He threw up his arms. "If I knew what the trade-offs and weak points of these materials were, would I have gone into trauma medicine first? And what is with these constant complaints about my bedside manner? I have a _fine _bedside manner, no one complained before I came here! What do they expect me to do, tuck them in and read them a bedtime story?"

Douglas cleared his throat. "Well, if it's information on armor and design trade-offs you want, I'm just down the hall from your office."

"No, no, at least this way _one _of us is getting some actual work done around here." Alba waved off his offer with a wing.

"I'm sorry," X apologized.

"If you're sorry, then join medical again. You're wasted out there."

"It's X's decision," Dr. Cain reminded Alba.

"Yet it's true. Only an engineering breakthrough is going to be able to discover what is behind the sudden rise in irregular construction. If the theory that it was due to the previous downswing and quality checkers growing complacent was true, the number would have gone down again already. And the reason you want to be out there in the first place," he told X, "Is that with your armor and systems, it's safer for you than the rest, but if you were here, working on better armor and systems, then it would be safer for all of them, not just you. General Sigma thinks that you are being very selfish in your nobility, and frankly, I agree. Who do you think you are, Megaman?"

He shrugged when almost everyone glared at him. "I didn't say it wasn't noble. Short-sighted, but noble. Even so: Sigma doesn't agree with X, and it's an insult to the man to assume that it's because he doesn't understand your reasons. He _does _understand, probably better than I do, since he's known you as long as he's been alive, and he's not suddenly going to wake up one day and see the light. Implying that he's being childish because he disagrees with you is being petty. Of course he's angry with you for acting like that. He probably feels like you've betrayed him, both him personally and reploids as a race. Here he is, being professional and being noble by allowing you to join the wrong wing of the hunters so at least you're doing something, even if it's not what you should be doing, and not bringing it up in front of people, and here you are gossiping about it. I take it back: my workday is not upgrades, upgrades, upgrades, it's upgrades, gossip insulting the General for having an opinion of his own, upgrades, gossip insulting the General for taking pity on a certain suicidal irregular and insinuating it's because he's attracted to her, ignoring the good he's done for countless other irregulars. Then, it's back to more upgrades! If I wanted to listen to gossiping magpies, I'd stay home with my pets! It's very depressing to see the great Dr. Light's creation, the source of all reploids, acting like an immature teenager. Or perhaps it explains a lot."

On that note, he swept out of the break room. He didn't slam the door, but the way his feathers were ruffled conveyed the sentiment clearly enough.

"He's right." X sighed. "I should apologize to Sigma. I've been undermining discipline by complaining to you in public, and he doesn't need that right now." Not with irregular activity on the rise.

"If he didn't want people to think he liked Zero, he shouldn't have given her his own beam saber," was Douglass' comment. "Sponsoring her into the hunters, sure. Everyone knows that if she wasn't given a chance to feel like she could do something to make up for it…" He didn't have to mime slitting his throat. "It's going to be hard enough to keep her from dying anyway, since she's hard to repair, but at least this gives her a chance."

"It meant a lot to her," X pointed out. "He may have just given it to her to make it clear that he didn't blame her and that he admired how hard she'd been training." He was really just trying to play devil's advocate. The gift, and especially the way Zero had lowered her head and it had been clear she would have blushed if she'd had that capability, had been the cutest thing he'd ever seen.

"It's obvious that she has a crush on him, no one's arguing that." Dr. Cain grimaced. "Except the ones who think this is all some ruse to assassinate him for her builder or say she's toying with him for some other reason. True, since her armor and buster are in a separate unit, she needed a handheld weapon just in case Lion couldn't get to her, but it's obvious why she chose the beam saber when the sensible thing would have been to get a ranged weapon, not something that forces her to get close to the target when she might not be able to absorb much damage." He sighed. "Is it really so wrong to want my son to find happiness?"

"When it's related to a major discipline problem and is driving him up the wall… Probably." X had to admit. "We both know that they're not going to be able to date until this dies down. She's good. She made unit commander on her own merit and she's certainly able to beat me in practice, but half the hunters are saying it's because she's seducing him." It made her hide behind a stoic mask even more than she did already, and she practically never went outside her quarters without being merged anymore so people couldn't get a good look at her body. Even human clothing wasn't enough concealment: the fact she _could _wear human clothing, and off-the-rack at that said it all, really. The whispers made her ashamed and Sigma coldly furious.

X looked down at his teacup. "There are the people who lost friends and loved ones in the massacre, the people who are jealous of…" They all knew what she had that others would be jealous of. "The ones who are jealous that Sigma… allegedly picked her instead of them, and the ones who actually do want to undermine Sigma's authority." Like Vile. "I really do have to apologize to him. Not that he'll accept it until I rejoin medical, and I can't do that. After this wave of irregulars is over, maybe. I at least need to complete training, so that I can fight if a situation like hers ever comes up again." A too-powerful opponent, not a broken industrial model but a killing machine with a glitch that barely hindered its performance. "No wonder he doesn't want to talk to me right now. I should buckle down, focus on training, and see if I can give him some actual evidence that I'm not more trouble than I'm worth."

"I'm sure he doesn't think that," Dr. Cain said.

"Right now, it may be true."

Douglas wondered, "Did you hear the one that says that she used her wiles to get Sigma to assign you to her unit for training, and that she's going to try to seduce you too, since you have all that money?"

X may have given the rest of the world permission to build reploids, but Cain Labs still made a killing from mechanaloid construction and the licensing of the rest of the technology they'd found along with X. It was how they funded their own reploid construction and the Irregular Relief Effort, aka the Irregular Hunters.

"I have had people insist on warning me about her." Even when he'd made it clear he didn't want to listen. "Why do you think I don't hang out in the hunter common areas and get to know my new co-workers?"

"I thought you missed me."

"Of course I want to visit you, Dr. Cain, but If Dr. Alba thinks it's bad here, he shouldn't hang out in the main lobby. He'd blow a gasket." X finished his tea after his internal clock signaled him. "Time to head back to training."

"How is she holding up?" She was still Dr. Cain's patient, even though now as a Hunter instead of an Irregular.

"She's miserable, but she was already miserable." He might have told her not to blame herself when she'd woken up, along with Dr. Cain and Sigma, but it had been inevitable. "If anything, she thinks she deserves it, which is unhealthy but since she basically joined so that she could feel like she was performing penance in the first place…" X shrugged. He didn't like seeing people get hurt, but if masochism kept her from going off somewhere and triggering her self-destruct? "I don't think she's currently a suicide risk."

"Well, that's an improvement. Do you mean that the rumors people are spreading to destroy her are actually helping her mental state?"

X had to laugh and admit that, "You may be right. That, and the fact that Sigma's still standing up for her despite all this. Well, as much as he can." Without it backfiring.

"Maybe I should up the refractory index of his armor." Dr. Cain and X both turned to stare at Douglas. "What?" he wondered.

"I know you were listening to this whole conversation about the delicacy of people's feeling, public morale, and not making Sigma find an excuse to put you on the practice field so someone can shoot you for causing yet more knight in shining armor jokes," Dr. Cain mused. "Is your processor acting up?"

"He needs to shoot somebody. And making an example of someone might help shut the rest of them up."

"The question is who." Dr. Cain looked at X.

"No, I draw the line at helping you set someone up to be maimed, sorry. As much as they would probably deserve it." X ducked out before they could try to pin him down and make him late.

* * *

><p><em>I won't be very surprised if anyone figures out who Dr. Alba is.<em>

_It's not really a twist, I just wanted to toss him in there since I needed to toss in someone and getting to know him now would make the later encounter more interesting, since interpersonal relationships is about all this fic has going for it._

_It amused me to have someone get to call X on being immature, since the early games are the only time when there are multiple reploids running around that are only, say, a few months younger than X (not counting hibernation or mavericks) instead of with lifespans that could be measured as a percentage of his. By X5 (which is supposed to take place quite awhile after X4, depending on which of Capcom's official words you believe) and especially the post-five games, he's the old man. Not to mention the whole thing about how he's immune and they aren't, and being built by Dr. Light and having more ability to survive more combat damage is only a big special thing if combat is a big part of everyone's worldview. Here, we've got people who can rightfully see him as prettymuch just another colleague, and react to his systems being better than theirs with 'hmm, how do we figure out how to do that?' instead of desperate longing._

_I'd say the transition is complete by X4, given what Repliforce says about the world's morale. The vaccine in X3 was an expression of hope, really. That got shut down epically._

_Also, can you tell that I'm fond of dramatic irony? We know what's up with Sigma, but they don't._


	3. Chapter 3

_Apparently Serges' name should have been Sagesse. Why is that significant? Because the word means wisdom. What's another word that refers to someone intelligent? Wily._

_This was labeled 'Firebrand 4' in my documents folder for ages because I'd intended to go back and write a chapter with the Day of Sigma OVA, with Zero's reaction to her hero/crush turning evil and establishing X's view of her as something of a stepdaughter/would-have-been-daughter-in-law (and thus off limits) before going into the sacrifice. Unfortunately, I had uncooperative muses. Zero didn't want to angst and X didn't want to lose two children, one to madness and one dying right in front of him, because of his failure, in one war. If he thinks he's suffered enough, then I hope this Xmuse never finds out about Zero series._

_And this is likely where the fic started to wander off from what I had intended for it anyway. My work does that sometimes. Okay, a lot of times. Well, I needed to work on being meaner to my characters anyway. 'Aww, poor cute little canon newbuilt that was born (if the player was good enough) only to be killed by its prototype. Why don't I spare him… In order to make him suffer adorably!' I was very nice to One in the only other fic he's in. I need to not spoil my characters. I also need to make up for not making X suffer onscreen..._

_Please note that it's Angst instead of Humor in the summary. Originally I had a plan, but then scenes popped into my head and I wrote them. Still, this is an alternate X series, not a fixit at all._

* * *

><p>"Well, finally. I could only delay so long, you know."<p>

"Hand over Zero's parts!"

"Really, X, is that any way to speak to an old friend of… Well, no, you're used to shooting old friends by now, aren't you? In any case, I'd be happy to hand over Zero's last part, since it would save me the effort of repairing her, but I sent it on ahead, since there's something else I need you to carry back to base for me. Don't worry, I'll be happy to fix Zero up good as new in exchange."

"What are you talking about, Sagesse?"

"You really don't recognize me, do you? Well, that's not surprising, this body doesn't look anything like my last one. Would it help if I called you a gossiping magpie?"

"…Dr. Alba? You're _alive?_" This didn't look anything like him. The body was combat-capable, for one thing.

"Sagesse, Dr. Sharp Albatorix, Dr.… I have many names. In any case, here, take this." He pulled something out of the shadows by what turned out to be its hair.

"…Zero? But how?" Or was this Zero?

"_How dare you mistake this inferior knockoff for my greatest creation_!" X stared at the sudden passionate outburst. Alba coughed. "Well, I suppose there is a certain… passing resemblance." Ahem. "Anyway, here, take it back to base with you." He shooed the repliZero in X's direction.

The repliZero's eyes went wide at the idea of going anywhere near a stranger and it ducked back behind Sagesse.

"Is this some kind of trap?"

"While your paranoia is commendable, no, actually. You see, Sigma wanted me to build another Zero, and I said I couldn't possibly create anything decent, what with the time crunch and these shabby modern materials, but he just wanted it as a replacement body to slot Zero's parts into, and if we didn't need that he was going to have it attack you. Now, I am a genius, so even though I didn't really spend much time on it and all I had to work with were these shabby modern parts that I practically had to rebuild from the molecule up, it still turned out immune and so obviously I can't let it be killed _now_."

"Immune?"

"You haven't figured out that all of this is because of a virus yet? It's been months! Yes, a virus, that has the capability to bring people back to life. Myself, Sigma, Vile…"

"Sigma's alive again?"

"…what, you didn't think that this little sideshow was all that was going on, did you? Didn't I just say that Sigma asked me to build another body for Zero?"

"Zero died before Sigma died." He could have given the order then.

"Bwahahahahaha!" The repliZero came out from behind Sagesse to look up at his madly laughing face, puzzled by how weird the sound and look were. "My Zero is eternal!"

"Your Zero? She is not… property to be squabbled over!"

Now Alba smirked at him, and it was almost approving. "No," he said simply. "Never. But Zero _is_ my greatest creation!" His enthusiasm had returned.

"But you were built three months after Zero was found."

"Well, you see, the truth is…" Alba paused dramatically. "I lied on my resume."

X stared.

"What? Everyone does it. But yes. I was the one who built Zero: no one but myself is capable of creating such a perfect being. I should have left making this one to someone else, because obviously a genius like myself is incapable of producing terrible work even with such limitations, but I made it, and it is not only far superior to your creations, but it's immune. Meaning that if it dies now, it won't come back to life. I need to build something else to take care of that. So, shoo." He waved at the newbuilt, then turned to X. "Take it back to your base and look after it for awhile."

"You want me to just take this newbuilt and go?" X had a hard time believing that. The world had gone mad six months ago, yes, but this was both insane and a new variety of insanity.

"Well, first I was _going_ to try to kill you, but I haven't done any remodel work at all on this inferior body, so if we fight I'll have to go get _another _one, and I need to start work rebuilding Zero as soon as Sigma's minions get back from stealing her parts from your base. And then there's the fact that if I actually did kill or injure you, then you wouldn't be able to babysit or guard this thing on the way back to your base, which is like the one thing you're good for."

"I'm not going to just let you get away," X pointed out.

"Well, I _would _have gotten away if I hadn't waited around for you."

"How do I know this isn't a trap? A trick, to get this virus of yours inside our base?"

"Didn't I say that it was immune? That's the _problem_."

"What is this virus?" Because it sounded too good to be true. X had known, no, wanted to believe that Sigma wouldn't do this, and yet he had. If this was a lie, it was a truly tempting one, and Sigma would know that.

"Look, if I answer that question then will you act like a good little Lightbot and take the innocent little newbuilt back home with you where it will be safe from Sigma killing it because he can't control it?"

X knew he needed to fight, to kill, he shouldn't yield to his desire to talk instead, but, "…Alright. What is this virus?"

"It possesses reploids and makes them want to kill all humans, obviously. All of Sigma's forces are infected, so they have to obey him and so on. You've seen what happens then. It can also bring back the dead, as you can see. Zero is immune because she is my greatest creation, this one is immune because even though it's an inferior knock-off, it's an inferior knock-off of _Zero_, and you're immune because you spent that century in hibernation – certainly not because you were built by Dr. Light!" Ahem.

"…So if this one is immune, then it could fight the mavericks without…?" Being lost the way hunters could be, turning their weapons on each other or on X. Now matter how sure he had been of their loyalty.

"As though any of my creations would ever lose to… right." Um, yeah. Sigma had beaten Zero once already. "Oh, you'll probably warp its mind and it will try to oppose the maverick forces, but what do the temporary but agonizing deaths of a few inferior knockoffs matter next to the fate of my creation? The mavericks will triumph in the end, despite your futile attempts to stop them!" Alba started to laugh, then coughed. "You're trying to delay me, aren't you?" He turned to the replizero. "You, I'm leaving. I know he's a fool, but go with him."

The replizero looked at him with big eyes.

"Of course he wouldn't actually hurt you. He's just bluffing. He doesn't have it in him." Alba patted it on the head. "I don't particularly like taking orders from Sigma, so I think I'll self-destruct after I'm doing fixing Zero. I'll see you again if my creation ever needs me again, X. Oh, and, by the way? If Zero ever gets another hair on her head hurt because of you, then we will have words. And by words, I mean painful torture." On that note, he teleported out.

And X was left with a repliZero. Which apparently had been quiet all this time because Alba had given it a lollipop to keep it occupied.

It blinked at him, wondering why the staring. It had been in this world only a few hours, and had spent most of it entertained by watching all the really weird people.

* * *

><p>The base had been raided while he was gone, and all of Zero's parts stolen. "Alba? Is that true, X?"<p>

X nodded to Dr. Cain, unplugging his buster after recopying the new weapons data into the computer. "According to him. A computer virus would explain why they all started acting so… Not just irrationally, but the same kind of irrational, but I don't know how that's possible. Reploids… I was created to be immune to reprogramming." Reploids were just based on him. Their armor wasn't as strong, their anti-hacking defenses weren't as strong… "What have I done…" There was no time to mourn. "If Sigma's also still alive, that's some evidence there's a virus."

"The virus? There's a virus. It's black-purple," the replizero offered, to be helpful. The person that made it had said that it could only talk when there weren't lollipops, and no one had given it a lollipop after it had finished its on the way to this place. "My maker kept giving it to me and telling me to swallow it like a good creation since it was good for me, but it made me dizzy and tasted icky, so I kept deleting it. Can I have a lollipop?"

"What's your name?" Dr. Cain asked.

"Name? I don't have one. The bald person said that I was just a replacement for Zero, and my maker said that he'd been saving the name 'Meta' because it meant over everything else, sort of, but I was an inferior knockoff so I couldn't have it." It did have two secret names, but they were secrets. "…If I answer questions, will you give me a lollipop?" it attempted bargaining.

* * *

><p>This was wrong, this was wrongwrongwrong, but, but… Sigma…<p>

Except Sigma had told her to train and keep an eye on X, not, not attack him.

What was… going…

As she fought, her systems woke up, the fog cleared out of her head and she remembered.

This was _not _Sigma. Sigma would _never _do anything like this.

It was taking the coward's way out to take care of the generators and let X go fight Sigma, even if X had offered, eyes full of pity. Sigma was X's creation and friend, not her boyfriend, despite what everyone said.

Despite what they'd both wanted. She knew he wanted her, even now. He'd said that, after she was resurrected, and she _wished _she could stay but this was, this was _wrong_.

The sooner she finished, the sooner she could ask X what he'd meant when he'd said that this wasn't Sigma's fault, there was some virus. A virus could be cured, that was what the Irregular Hunters did, fix things. X and Cain had cured her, right? Sigma had said X was the best they had.

They had to fix him, they just had to.

* * *

><p>"You found the bastard that made me and let me escape and kill all those people and you let him get away?" Aargh! "Is this how you repay me for <em>blowing myself up <em>to save your ass?" Zero would have been a lot more threatening if Lion hadn't already demerged to go examine the replizero, who started to pet it with the hand that wasn't holding its latest lollipop. Lion was disappointed that the new one's armor was just plain armor. He missed the other support units.

Oh well. The Queen had decided to kill them, and that was that. It wasn't his place to argue.

* * *

><p>"Well, we can't scan this one any more than we can Zero, but we have been able to determine that its armor is not a separate support unit, but more traditionally designed. And, as you can see," Dr. Cain pointed at the schematic, "The design under the armor is also more traditional." In other words, gender indeterminate instead of Zero's… curves.<p>

"So this one isn't an exact duplicate?" Zero pointed at it.

"Only outwardly. Wearing human clothing or with redesigned armor, the differences become very apparent." Dr. Cain gestured at the young reploid, who had been put in human clothing while they checked the armor for booby traps and waited to see if they could trust it to walk around armed or not. "As you can see, it resembles an adolescent more than a mature man or woman. Dr. Alba clearly started with standard parts and a standard frame when building it, as he told X. A frame like Zero's would have had to be built from scratch, but this is the classic design." No lumps imitating rather shapely breasts, for example.

"It looks like X," was Zero's assessment.

Speaking of which, Dr. Cain and X looked at the newbuilt. "Which pronoun would you like to be addressed with?"

"We still need to help it pick out a name, too," Dr. Cain reminded X.

The newbuilt didn't have to think very long. "If I were a female model, I wouldn't look very well made next to Zero, is that it?"

"Yes," Zero told it. She knew she looked good, although it got her more insults than compliments.

"I'll be a boy, then." He nodded and stuck his current lollipop back in his mouth.

"Alba said that he wasn't good enough to be called Meta." That was just wrong.

"Well, we can't call him that now, it ends with an A." Sigma had been named before reploid naming etiquette got set in stone. It was rude to call a reploid 'it' if they'd chosen a gender, since that implied that they were a thing, and to avoid miscues it was very inconsiderate for a 'male' reploid to choose an outwardly feminine name. Male was generally the default, or what people picked when they just didn't care.

Nowadays, Sigma, especially since it ended in 'ma' which connotated motherhood, would be an outright rude name for a male reploid to have, since it just confused people, if it weren't for the fact that it was already established as a male name due to its famous owner.

Of course, no one would be naming newbuilts Sigma anymore.

"That rules out Sera," X said thoughtfully. They'd considered that early on as an alternative way to pronounce Zero, something with a little more personality to it, when Zero had been a bit worryingly insistent on being 'nothing.' "Cero? No, that's really too similar. Do either of you have any suggestions?"

The newbuilt shrugged.

"Actually…" Zero hesitated. "When we were coming up with names for Lion, the other one we nearly picked was, well… One."

"Zero and One? Binary!" Dr. Cain liked it.

There was really only one person that Zero would have been asking what to name her support unit other than X or Dr. Cain, due to the fact that only one person had been on friendly terms with her then. X smiled. "That's clever. Sigma was the one who asked Dr. Alba to make him, so it's sort of like…"

"Not now." Zero interrupted him. "I can't think like that now. I have to fight." Her eyes were hard when they met X's, and he bowed his head in the face of her resolve. "Is my creator the one responsible for this?"

"I don't think so," X told her, frowning. "He said that he had to take orders from Sigma. Sigma can't be responsible for this if it's a virus, of course, but I don't see why someone who would create a virus that took control of reploids would hand over control of their own actionsto someone else. He did seem to know a lot about what was going on, though. He _was _very intelligent, from what I saw back then." Of course, Alba had been hired to replace him, so he hadn't been in medical at the same time as him. "He may have only found out about the virus after he was infected, and started studying it then. Or whoever made him might have told him all this."

Dr. Cain recalled that, "He was a very good designer, his complaints aside. He just tended to design far ahead of the capabilities of his materials, which makes sense if he started out working with antique parts like Zero's."

From what X remembered, "He was working on hardware only, right? Not programming?"

Dr. Cain nodded. "Hardware only. He said that was his specialty."

"Zero's physical structure and design are very impressive, but if programming was his weak point, that may explain the mental glitches. Zero? He described you as his ultimate creation… Actually, I think that irrationality in general might be a symptom of this virus. And it might get worse over time. He didn't rant like that when I knew him."

"He ranted." Dr. Cain remembered a certain rant at X.

"Yes, but not randomly sprouting off about his greatest creation and… Not like that. I'll write down the conversation for you later," X promised. "Anyway, Zero, I think that he viewed you as some sort of magnum opus. He may have been trying to build every bell and whistle into you that he could, instead of optimizing you to kill. I mean, I wasn't built to kill either, and I have quite a few of those capabilities. It's nice to be able to go out incognito," and not get swarmed, "and summon armor in emergencies. And Lion is just adorable." In other words: your creator might have cared about you instead of just seeing you as a killing machine, the way we all thought.

"Why don't I have one?" One asked, sad. Lion was cool.

"He said that you were a rush job. That's probably why you aren't as… sculpted, either." One lacked several of Zero's assets, including those.

One frowned, looking down. He wanted a Lion. "I'll give you lollipops if you become my support unit?"

"I don't think he'd fit you very well." Zero smirked, then it became a tad more gentle. "Sorry, kid."


	4. Chapter 4

_I actually kind of want one of the armors X gets to be a support unit, the trouble with that is my justification for why they're never around by the next war. But that's just in my head… He could probably use a pet, really, with what he goes through. The trouble is that mechanaloids can be infected too, and a recently-built support unit (by the Light hologram, not Wily) obviously couldn't be immune, not if one assumes that the hibernation is the only reason X is._

* * *

><p>Since Zero had a lot of catching up to do (after being dead) and didn't know what to think about the idea of a kid that was related to her and also sort of vaguely in some chain of command metaphorical sense to Sigma, they couldn't send him to room with her.<p>

Sticking him in general quarters was out because he was potentially a valuable resource on several levels, too valuable to lose to assassination. Dr. Cain's quarters were out because he was an old and frail human, and that left X.

It might have been more practical to leave him in lockup, but One didn't seem to have a malicious bone in his body, even if he had the approximate level of understanding of how the world and its people worked of a concussed duckling. Apparently Alba had given him barely any general knowledge, and absolutely nothing about current events or culture. He didn't even know what reploids or humans were! Sigma and the other mavericks had generally creeped him out, so he'd followed his maker around, he told them, and now he tended to follow X, Lion or whoever he was told to.

Since One was related to Sigma in that murky sort of way and Dr. Cain had built Sigma, Dr. Cain had asked One to be his grandson, which One had agreed to, even with only a vague idea of what this entailed, because the big person (it was a few weeks before anyone realized they needed to explain to One that no, Dr. Cain's life support chair was not a part of his body, which was how they found out that One had no idea there were two kinds of people in the world, one that was mechanical and one that wasn't) had looked hopeful.

Apparently being a grandson involved lollipops and popcorn, so that was nice. Grandfathers were sort of like makers, then, One decided. That made sense, since the word meant makers of makers. Sort of. And like X, too, since X had helped him pick out clothing and stuff. And read him stories out of paper books and didn't mind explaining what a dragon was since they couldn't get data to upload to One any more than they could Zero, so he had to sit down and read an encyclopedia when he wasn't training. And history books and stuff.

He found both of his secret names in one of them, only not exactly, but they were secret so he didn't tell anyone that. It was still kind of worrying, because he liked X. He _thought _his maker sort of liked X. His maker wouldn't send One with someone he didn't trust, would he? One didn't _want _X to die, and Zero didn't either.

Except it was very different back then, and they had things called wars but mostly people didn't die in them, so it was probably ok. His maker had said it was ok if he didn't like the virus, he didn't try to force him to take it, so he would probably listen if he said he wanted to keep X.

Well, probably.

So he should probably get strong. Also, there was Sigma, who Zero had liked and was now really, really creepy. Sigma was _not _One's maker. And if they shared a maker, then Zero was his sister, not his mother, but he didn't want to argue with X, since not being related to Sigma meant not being related to X.

There was apparently this thing called in-laws, and since X and Dr. Cain were as good as family, that meant Sigma and X were family, and since Sigma and Zero would have been family if it weren't for the virus (at least probably) that meant X and Zero were sort-of-family, so… Frankly, One thought that X's arguments didn't really work that way, but he thought that arguing wouldn't help anything since either he'd lose or he'd win and X would stop 'spoiling' him. It wasn't nice to take advantage of people, theoretically, but this made X happy and in exchange he got lollipops and so on, so it _was _a pretty nice situation and 'sweet deal.'

Idioms were _weird_.

Honestly, Lion probably had the best idea with not talking. If One could pretend he couldn't talk, then people wouldn't ask him questions all the time about his maker and so on. There had been a problem with Zero, so she'd killed a bunch of people (although less than Sigma) and although most people said it wasn't Zero's fault (now, at least, according to Dr. Cain), they wanted to blame his maker now, and One _liked _his maker, which made people frown and make notes and think that he was a security risk. He'd told them everything he knew anyway, since X had asked, except his secret names, but that was about _him,_ not his maker, until he'd figured out what they meant.

He wished he hadn't, because that made him feel dishonest, and worry that they might figure out he wasn't saying something important that they certainly would want to know, after he'd _promised _to tell them everything, and he _was _except stuff that was related to stuff that'd he'd promised to keep secret.

He didn't like lying to X, even by omission, because X was nice, but it would just make everything too complicated if they knew.

Everybody was busy all the time, trying to get hunters trained up and stuff for if he tried anything again. He got put in with Zero's, which was boring. Well, sometimes it was like a game. He liked the play-combat stuff, but the drills were boring. He could understand why they were important the way X said, but they were still boring. Shooting at targets and doing things over and over and over. Some people agreed it was boring, and other people said that it was bad to call it boring because it was important.

"Can't things be boring and important at the same time?" He didn't think the two words were mutually exclusive, but it could be an idiom or connotation thing.

"Normally," Zero said, standing behind them, "Hunters don't tell other hunters that training is boring unless they're rebellious and want to skip." She'd come over when she saw that one of the sergeants was talking to One and trying to intimidate him into proper discipline.

He turned around to address her. "But someone asked me. Was I supposed to lie?"

"Why you little…" Zero stuck an arm out to hold the sergeant back.

"That's actually an honest question. He was built to be a spare body or disposable soldier: of course he doesn't know things like that. I thought I had informed you that his database contained only the minimum?"

"My apologies, Commander. I didn't make the connection." Geography was one thing, the rules of conversation another. One had acted in a way that a hunter never did unless they were being deliberately cheeky, so the sergeant had assumed that was the case.

Zero tapped her fingers on Lion's head thoughtfully. "It's still a problem. Unequal treatment can undermine discipline." If One got away with acting smart, everyone else might start thinking that they could, too. "And he's clearly distracting the rest of your squad. Who said that you could stop practicing?" she barked at the gawkers, who hurriedly turned back to their targets. "Sergeants, note who stopped: I want them all spending an extra hour on target practice!" Undisciplined raw recruits… "I thought X was making sure that you studied the important things…" Of course, that was X's idea of important: of course military discipline wasn't on the list. It had never really applied to X.

"You're not suited to standard tactics, anyway." No more than Zero, X, or anyone with an extremely atypical body structure was. "You really should be assigned to medical until someone has time to deal with you." Right now, the only experienced trainer who could deal with a student with so many special circumstances was, well, her. X could deal with the special circumstances, but the point was to train the boy to stay alive and X didn't have it in him to teach a child dirty tricks. "At least you had a fighting style programmed in, but it's clearly a knock-off of mine," like One himself, "and not only is it not suited to you, you aren't suited to it." Zero's style was centered around an aggressive offense: only someone able to go for the kill, to get in their opponent's face and fight to stay there could use it effectively.

X, on the other hand, had his reluctance to kill. He could never fight the way Zero did. Instead he kept his distance, planned, and did what was necessary. It couldn't be said that he eliminated opponents with surgical precision, but if he was there to kill someone, he was there to kill someone, not injure them and beat them down as much as possible (until they stayed down).

One was more like X than her. In her expert opinion, One took to the beam saber like a fish took to a bicycle. He'd been programmed with how to use it, but when she'd fenced with him to see how good it was, he'd kept parrying her strokes and trying to back up. When there was an opening (one that a rookie could see) he'd strike, but…

…that was it. "A shield," she murmured. "Some material that can reflect energy, with a transparent slit that you can look through while charging shots. You'd need very powerful dash boots and a lot of mobility for it…" for some reason, it suddenly seemed that One was too tall. He didn't fit the image in her head. Still, "It's worth looking into." She'd ask Douglass. One had more flexibility than most reploids, perhaps he could crouch so it wouldn't take too massive a shield to provide adequate cover.

Crouching could help him spring forward, too, and a shield bash would certainly mess up his enemy's stance and leave them wide open for a charged shot, on top of the impact damage. The trouble was that a style like that was best suited to one-on-one fights, since a shield could only provide cover on one side. Perhaps he could sort of fasten it to his back when he wasn't using it?

Objectively, she knew that would look silly and probably impede waist rotation, but it was all so clear in her head. A small figure, red and gray armor with yellow waving in the air behind him, skilled and dangerous, reluctant to fight but more than capable of achieving his objectives on the battlefield…

…unless there were dirty tricks involved.

"It probably wouldn't work." People who fought like that would die, for some reason she was certain of it. The way X would if he didn't fight seriously, when he hadn't fought to kill but to get through to his opponent.

Actually, knowing about the virus was going to improve X's chances a few thousand percent. He wouldn't waste time trying to figure out why they were doing this or hoping they would snap out of it.

She could almost thank the bastard who had made her for telling them.

"I'll talk with X. For now, keep practicing, but you are no longer a member of this squad."

He blinked at her, and frowned a bit. Had he already started getting attached to them?

"They're being trained for standard tactics. Suppression fire." Well, standard tactics as revised to deal with the virus. It was suicidal to let an infectious enemy get close, while the Irregular Hunters had been focused on trying to get close enough to disable the reploid without hurting them more than the minimum necessary. "There's nothing wrong with making friends, but when they get shot at, you won't be with them. They can't train with you as part of the team, or they'll be learning how to handle things with you there." Someone who could, theoretically, go to close-quarters combat, keep the enemy pinned down while everyone else kept their distance.

She sighed. "Theoretically, it won't matter. The vaccine research is going well, so hopefully it's just a matter of time before we can stop all this. We're still going to have to defend the researchers and fight off mavericks until then." But the troops training now were just about certain to see at least one battlefield in their lives. Reploid construction had been lowered to the minimum necessary, in order to try to limit the spread, but the ranks of the hunters were expanding. "Sigma's not stupid. He'll try something. If Alba was telling the truth, he'll be trying to stop the vaccine and kill or capture you, me, and X so no one on our side can figure out why we're immune."

One thought that having people try to scan him and stick really tiny cameras into him and all sorts of things in the labs was also a combination of really boring and kind of cool. He got to see his own insides: that had been fun at first, but it paled after awhile and they kept asking _questions_.

"You really should be kept in medical…" Sigma was right, Zero thought. Yet he'd simultaneously been wrong: in the end, X's insistence on getting trained had saved them all. "I really should be training you. This is practically artillery, a close quarters and unarmed specialist isn't suited to teaching it, the trouble is that there are barely any veterans who know anything about it either, much less how to teach." She should have X do this.

Except X also needed to act as a commander (temporary, nothing was finalized about any of this), researcher, and student: he had his own training to see to. She could have One spar against him, at least.

Or… Zero started to smile, slowly. The unit needed practice taking out opponents before they got close, X needed practice handling armies, and X's armor could take enough punishment that they could use weakened buster fire for added realism.

If the shield idea got approved instead of blasted to pieces by Douglass, then One would need practice dealing with fire from several enemies, too…

"Come with me," she ordered the kid, and swept out of the training room, Lion padding after her.

This was going to be evil, and effective, and it might just keep all, or at least most of them, alive.

Sigma would never forgive himself if he was responsible for X's death.

Much less that of this kid, who was not their child, but…

(But someday…)


	5. Chapter 5

_Is it shallow of me to be less interested in a female Zero? One that isn't paired with X to boot? Well, everyone has their favored pairings. And Zero in a male body is Estrogen Brigade Bait, and I'm female. Zero with actual boobs is kind of 'Bah, I've got my own.' Aka what I call 'fanservice for the wrong gender.' Hence the shift to a family focus in the fic, perhaps. I get more comedy this way, too._

* * *

><p>"It tastes icky."<p>

X didn't even need to look up from his book. "One, don't eat the vaccine. We were only given so many doses for the trial." Although, honestly, since One had tasted the virus before, that might give them some information. Zero must have put him up to it, since One was generally far too sensible to pick up random small vials and put them in his mouth.

"It's the wrong color, but it tastes like the virus."

"Yes, that's because it's a vaccine. It's supposed to make the reploid's systems think it's the virus to train them to fight off the virus."

"Like the figures in target practice?" One frowned. Did it work that way? Not for him or Zero, but maybe X. "What does it taste like to you?"

"I didn't taste it, I administered it properly." Of course, One's systems weren't as good as breaking down what he ate into its component materials as X's were. Very little of the vaccine, if any, would have survived intact to enter his systems proper if X had eaten it. "My systems reacted, there was a moment of dizziness. It really should work." Doppler's vaccine was very good at calling attention to itself. X wouldn't even have noticed such a small amount of actual virus.

"Does it make other people dizzy?"

"It causes some temporary bugs, which is actually a good thing. Like fevers in humans, it shows that the reploid's defenses have been activated." The problem with the maverick virus was that it was too good at concealing itself. Normally, reploids didn't know it was there until after it had won. This vaccine had been made by taking some of the few distinctive signs of the virus, like that odd energy signature, and building them into old-style hacker nanites that were programmed to attack reploid systems. That way, their anti-virus would notice that the nanites were there, learn how to recognize them, and hopefully realize that the virus had the same traits and kill it if they were infected.

That was why X was here. Normally, he was too busy for guard duty, but they couldn't risk the samples being destroyed, or worse, switched or contaminated, by a maverick trying to discredit Dr. Doppler's research. The immune hunters had been keeping an eye on it since it arrived, in shifts, as Dr. Cain tried to sort the volunteers and have enough placebo manufactured for the control group, which consisted of all the volunteers they didn't have doses for. It would be harder for Sigma to target test participants if practically everyone was participating.

"They should get rid of it because they don't like it. Or because it's not them, like you."

"Well, they can't realize they don't like it because they don't know it's there."

"But it changes their thoughts, right? They should know that those thoughts aren't theirs."

"Not everyone knows themselves as well as you, or I, or Zero. It keeps them from seeing anything wrong with it."

One clearly guessed he'd take X's word for it but still didn't understand.

"They aren't as well built as we are. They don't have my self-knowledge, Zero's self-protection, or your self-awareness." One was aware of everything that went on his systems to a very extreme degree: it often distracted him, as hard as they'd worked to train him to focus. "The virus sneaks up on them."

"That's what Zero said too, but Zero still thinks that this isn't any good. Well, it will help, if it works, but there needs to be a cure, since the virus can bring people back over and over."

"Yes, but we can learn to identify the mavericks that come back, and destroy their bases and factories."

"There are lots of people who could come back and don't because they use new people right? So it wouldn't just be Sigma and Vile. And then they would get experience."

"And hunters would have a chance to get experience themselves. Zero is right. I hope that the vaccine will give us enough breathing room to find an actual cure. But acting like the vaccine doesn't matter because it's not a cure?" X shook his head. "It's not that Zero wants her unit to die."

"If they can be brought back, then it's not so bad if they die. The vaccine means more people will die-die."

"Because they won't have the virus in their systems when they're killed, so there's less chance they can be brought back?" X sighed, closing his book. "That's a very depressing thought." What was almost worse was that, "Most hunters agree that death is preferable to infection. That it's better to die as yourself than be warped into a different person, a mockery of you that kills people. I know what Sigma would have chosen. At this point, I don't know if he would want to be cured."

"He should. Zero wants him back."

"Yes, but she should know what it's like to wake up a murderer, even if it's not his fault any more than it was hers. Zero… Zero is cold most of the time, but she does care about people. A lot."

"She's kind of the opposite of you," One agreed. "You care about everyone, but you don't really love anyone in particular. I mean, you care a lot about Dr. Cain, and me and Zero!" He didn't mean to say that X wasn't good family. "But it's still caring. Zero does look after people, like her unit, but she doesn't really care about anyone except a few people, and she cares about them a whole lot. She wouldn't care if Sigma was guilty and wanted to die if he came back. She'd want him to stay." One was very attached to his family, but he'd also made quite a few friends. Then they'd started getting infected and dying. In many cases before they even made it out of training. X was worried that if this kept up, One would withdraw entirely from making friendships. Cling to the ones who would hopefully stay instead of striking out to build his own family. And then what would happen if any of them died?

"That was how she felt, and Sigma was there for her. She'd want to be there for him. She'd never forgive herself if she wasn't able to help him through it, if he… couldn't bear what has happened." Sigma would be even more of a suicide risk than Zero herself had been. "She'll need you to be there for her, if that happens. I know Sigma would have liked you. If things had been different." If the virus hadn't happened, if the rumors had died down, if only… "People have been terrified since the first war. We had no idea what had just happened. What had possessed Sigma to fire those missiles. So many people who wouldn't have hurt a fly, who had joined the hunters to _help_ people suddenly turning against everything they had believed in. Then people began to wonder if it was literal possession, when people would suddenly be… different. Once we knew that we needed to watch the hunters, it became apparent that it wasn't indoctrination, not when it could happen to almost newbuilts. People would just suddenly… change, and sometimes those around them noticed, and often they didn't until they were shot in the back. It was terrifying. Knowing that it was a virus gave us a reasonable explanation. Viruses can be prevented and cured. We owe your maker a debt of gratitude for that knowledge."

"Zero still hates him."

"And you don't like that?"

"He kept saying that she was his greatest creation. He wouldn't have meant for her and Lion to be sick like that. And all the deaths happened because they were sick, right? He wouldn't have deliberately made her an irregular. It's not his fault all that happened to her."

"He should have come forward and admitted that he'd made her instead of abandoning her. Of letting her take the blame for his mistake. She thought that she'd killed her own maker. Everyone thought that. One. Dr. Alba _is _a maverick."

"I'll shoot him, if I need to. It's only fair. You and Zero had to fight Sigma, and I understand why Zero likes Sigma more than him. Sigma was there for her."

"Well, actually, you should see if you can get any more information out of him first. If he built the two of you to be immune, it's possible that he himself has a weaker form of your self-awareness. He handed over information that Sigma _definitely_ didn't want us to have. If he's been studying the virus and has _some _ability to think thoughts it wouldn't want him to think, like your life being more important than winning the war, he would be a valuable source." They _needed _to know what breakthrough Dr. Alba had made, that let him build immune reploids.

"Zero said to just shoot him. That smart people can come up with things, and he was trying to infect me back then, so he'd probably try again."

"That is a risk, yes."

"That's why I don't think it works that way."

"What?" One was prone to jump a few steps ahead in the conversation without explanation.

"The virus. If it's something that people can just resist, then if he made the two of us immune, and maybe made himself resistant, then he should have been able to fight it off. It's something bad, anyone would fight it off if they could." Anyone who wasn't evil. "Maybe this will make them resistant, but that won't do any good if being resistant, if trying to fight doesn't help. Maybe it's different for you, but it's not fighting, it's refusing. Does that make any sense?"

"You refused the virus?"

"Yes." Of course. Did X think that he'd be okay with something like it?

"Even though your maker gave it to you?"

"Even though. There's _no _good reason for something like that. It's wrong."

"People need to realize that it's there in order to realize that it's wrong, One," X reminded him.

"But once they have the virus, mavericks know it's there."

"And it keeps them from realizing that anything is wrong."

"But…" One didn't know how to put it differently, how to make X see his point. X had seen that expression on countless faces.

"One? I understand what you're saying. I just don't agree with you. You are _not _a typical reploid. None of us are. Trying to judge their systems by how it works for us is like saying that fish should be able to climb trees because monkeys can. Study reploid systems as long as Dr. Doppler has, and _then _you can argue with him about whether or not his antivirus research is barking up the wrong tree. Until then, the way to find out if you're right or not isn't to try to find different words, it's by doing the test." Ah, the scientific method. "Although I am biased," he admitted, since they were being scientific. "I hope that you're wrong."

* * *

><p>"Two nanite clumps, and the processor is split down the middle. They just won't remerge. I've tried everything." Dr. Cain looked far older than he was all the time, but that bleak look added another decade. "I hoped that… I'm going to use the word 'prenatal' exposure to ethical simulations would help stimulate awareness of thought processes," and hence immunity, "but it keeps causing this phenomenon."<p>

"You started with a relevant ethical dilemma, didn't you. You started with something that I still can't deal with, even after that century." X shook his head. "It isn't safe to put them in a tube and give them time to work up to it, and it wouldn't solve the immediate problem."

"How _did_ you resolve the conflict between compassion for all living beings and the necessity of fighting to protect?" The conflict, the dilemma, the _logic bomb_ that kept breaking these developing minds apart into two personalities, one that could deal with each one of the two mutually exclusive realities.

X looked surprised. "I didn't. That's not something that _can _be resolved. And it definitely _shouldn't _be. There's no right answer. Both answers are wrong. It's wrong to kill, regardless of the reason, and it's wrong to stand by and let people be killed. The only right option is to find a way to resolve conflicts that isn't killing, but taking time to think is still standing by and letting lives end. Three options, and all of them cause suffering and death, just to slightly different people. To choose an option is to choose to allow suffering and death. Is to believe that those things are _okay_ when they are not. That is never right."

"You think that killing mavericks is wrong?" Still? Even after the discovery of the virus?

"Of course. Killing them doesn't solve anything, it just slightly decreases but prolongs their suffering. It saves the lives they were targeting right then, but what about tomorrow, and the day after? This is a stalemate. All we're doing is drawing out the agony until one side or the other breaks the stalemate. How am I supposed to be okay with that? I am not accomplishing anything out there, not anything _real, _and that means I am failing. For me to be okay with killing someone, it would have to accomplish something, at the _minimum_. Zero says that any fight you walk away from is a good one, but every battle we fight is a Pyhrric victory. I have to fight. I understand that. Living is better than dying. Protecting what I can is better than doing nothing. I have to go out there, but I don't have to like it. Sometimes, there's no right answer. No good option. Just the least wrong. I don't like the fact that killing Sigma over and over is the least wrong option, but I have to live in reality now."

"Do you ever wish that I hadn't found you?" Hadn't woken you to this broken nightmare of a world?

"Never." Never think that, my friend. "I couldn't let you do this alone." Dreaming peacefully while the world died? What a horrible thought. "The only right answer to that question is to never ask it. For the world to be a place of peace." Maybe, someday… "A place where people are wise enough to be peaceful. Where there will be sorrow no more. A utopia like that, though, is just a dream. There are people, like Zero, that are good people but could never be happy in a world like that. Like the Elysian fields. There was another area of Hades for warriors."

"Zero would fit right in at Valhalla, wouldn't she?"

Man, that mental image. "Please don't tell her about that myth, she doesn't drink to relax but that may change as soon as she finds out about barfighting." Zero actually _enjoyed _fighting, when there was nothing on the line. It really would help her unwind, but it would have the opposite effect on everyone else.

"Yes, that would be… Right. In any case, I think I'm going to give up and construct these two bodies. Perhaps life experience might allow them to overcome this and find a resolution."

"Or perhaps it's more like a zygote splitting than MPD or anything like that. Twins." X smiled at the thought. "Like Rock and Roll. We should keep an eye on them, though, just to make sure they're okay." That they weren't adversely affected by what had cleaved them in two.


	6. Chapter 6

"Ah, spring, when a young man's fancy turns to love." Well, not that the word man was accurate, but that was just a detail.

"It's technically the rainy season," X reminded Dr. Cain, sitting down by the side of his hoverchair.

"Details, details." Dr. Cain looked at him askance. "I never thought you'd object to romance." Or insist on dreary, practical terminology instead of the words of X's gentler time. "Spring. The word has always made me think of new life springing up out of the ground. Snow and then, suddenly, green leaves and cherry blossoms everywhere. A rebirth of the world." Youthful energy, not drained by time and hardship.

"The rainy season is also appropriate. Everything made new and clean." Grime and blood washed away, leaving room for new hope. "People walking together under the same umbrella."

"Well, they're always standing close enough for that." Chestnut brown and gold heads leaning against each other, hair falling intermingled.

"It's like they're everywhere." X smiled, remembering a few times he'd seen them. "I keep tripping over them." Seeing them so happy and carefree really made everything seem brighter.

"Of course you do, you spend much of your time in the main command room." Where Iris worked, spotting for Zero, "And when they're both off duty, they spend half the time in your quarters." Dr. Cain sighed. "Well, most people can only spend so much time looking at old fossils."

"Not half." Sadly. "Iris is teaching One how to spot, and he's finally discovered shopping."

"Shopping?" That was a surprise. "Our One?" Hunters had basic needs, like quarters and armor, provided for, of course, but the quartermaster also had a generous budget for morale expenses. In other words, things that would cheer them up. Dr. Cain was not a man who could send children to die without guilt, and it was only practical, with Sigma working to suborn reploids and get them to listen to him, get them in range of the virus, to make sure they lacked for nothing. Most hunters didn't have much of a concept of money because of this, other than in the amounts necessary to upgrade weaponry or run a unit. They also tended not to want much because they didn't know much of what was available, so requests tended to run to fad items, small things that someone had read about somewhere and then everyone wanted one. They were paid, of course, and handsomely, but with no time to teach them proper spending habits (and the fact that six month's pay seemed like a small amount compared to the logistics costs some of them were trained in) inexperience caused them to waste every cent they had the instant they started shopping online, and so they were told to save their money and go to the quartermaster for the little things, like twirly chairs and lollipops.

One had been spoiled from the moment he was turned on, which had caused him to have very little interest in money or material possessions. Money was an annoying thing that there was never enough of in his experience as an officer handling logistics, so his (considerable) bank account was regarded as a useless thing he didn't want to deal with. Also, while it had been nice that his builder had given him lollipops instead of just telling him shut up, he was always slightly suspicious of presents, in case the person giving them thought they could get away with using them as a substitute for affection or spending time with him.

He had a couple shelves in his quarters where he kept the interesting fossils, a handful of the ones Dr. Cain had asked if he wanted, some of the books X had pressed him to read (X had learned to just offer them as reading material, and if One didn't want to keep them they became part of X's library, for the others to read, with no hard feelings) and some small, miscellaneous things.

Dragon's baubles were in his bedside drawer, but that was Dragon being a pack rat, not One. That had also finally managed to convince him to keep the parts of dead bodies in a box under his bed. Until Dragon arrived, One had insisted on keeping them on his shelves so he could say goodnight to them instead of hiding them away in the dark, but Dragon slept on his precious things in order to guard them, so One had decided on his own to do the same.

One had never had the same view of life and death as other people.

There was a saying that everyone had a price, things that they wanted and would do anything for, but the things that One wanted had never been ones money could buy.

So, "Why on earth would he want to do that?" Dr. Cain wondered.

"For new things to show Iris, since he doesn't want her to leave."

"To leave him?" He thought that little of her? That she'd leave if he didn't bribe her?

"No, no." Of course not. "To leave the bases, where it's relatively safe. Sigma knows that she and Colonel are your newest attempt to replicate me. They almost certainly aren't immune, but he must want to make sure. Iris is too responsible to go anywhere dangerous." She didn't want everyone to worry, or be sad if she was caught, "But One has apparently decided to make sure." By making sure she didn't feel like she was confined, or lack for anything she wanted. "Although I think part of it may be that he was afraid of running out of things to show her."

Ah, yes. "She's adorable when she smiles, isn't she? Not that I should take credit for it." Most of it was her personality, and her face was modeled on X's.

"It's that little button nose. 'Cute as a button.' I didn't understand that phrase before." She was just adorable. "You should have seen her when I hinted that One didn't know anything about spotting. The older she gets, the more things she'll have to show him." The more things to bend their cute little heads over, examining them and talking about them. Different kinds of irises, and now other flowers. Books of photographs of beautiful vistas that weren't there anymore. Books of stories and history. Dresses and armor. Half of them things One didn't have any particular interest in, but found joy in because he got to show them to Iris, and things Iris enjoyed simply because they were new, part of this fascinating world she was discovering, and she got to discover them with him. Leaning over the plantings in the garden, standing in corners and chatting, sitting on benches and couches. Murmuring, chatting, laughing.

It seemed like the word should have been giggling, but Iris' laugh was soft, bright, and delighted, like tinkling bells, and One's chuckle, even when he laughed quietly for no reason but that he was happy, was clearly a laugh designed to be fiendish, like Zero's laugh of triumph or Dr. Alba's mad scientist laugh.

Two children laughing together while they plotted should have been inconsequential giggling, mere gossip, but One had learned tactics from Zero and Iris had quickly learned to be an excellent spotter.

Of course, neither of them knew the first thing about sneaking, except for on the battlefield, so everyone knew what they were up to.

Dr. Cain had tried to nudge One to make friends with Iris because here was finally a friend that he would be able to keep, and not just in the form of one of the bits of armor or circuitry kept on his shelves or under his bed, the ones he could say, "Good morning," and, "Goodnight," to all he liked, but would never be able to answer back ever again. No, Iris would be a spotter, not a fighter: that was what she'd decided.

At first One had been a little suspicious of the gift. He wasn't a child, not really, not anymore. He knew very well by now that this was war, and it was mean for people to make promises like that. He didn't avoid her, but he didn't want to grow close to her. Not because of her, but because of how he felt about Dr. Cain trying to set him up on playdates when he was older than more than half of the hunters now.

After awhile, Iris had settled in as Zero's spotter, looking up to her as one of the few active-duty female models. Zero hadn't known quite how to deal with her. For one thing, one X (one short brunette pacifist) to worry about was more than enough, and what did Zero know about how to keep long hair from getting messy? Hers took care of itself. One was the one who needed a comb.

Iris was something like a younger X, except female, so Zero had decided to try to nudge her in the direction of the younger her (except male). Iris had been a little hurt by that, since it made it seem like Zero didn't want anything to do with her, so avoiding One had been part of trying to say that she wanted to be friends with _Zero, _not a substitute.

Thus, they had kept themselves on the edge of each other's social orbits, pointedly avoiding each other in a way that was almost fellowship, some awareness of the motive they had in common: to make it clear that they would choose their own friends, thank you very much, instead of being shoved together.

Then, they had found common cause.

In a plan to shove two _other _people together.

"So much for principle," X reflected. It was a non sequiter, but Dr. Cain would surely know what he meant.

"Well, even if they _were _being so lovey-dovey in order to nudge Zero and Colonel along in the beginning, it's obviously genuine. Iris is certainly clever, and One can be subtle when it suits him," on commando raids, for instance, "but something like this wouldn't be their style." They wouldn't have been able to keep up an act like this for this long.

"Of course, that's just made them more determined to hook the two of them up." X chuckled fondly, both of them trying to ignore that he'd pulled up the readouts of Dr. Cain's chair. Trying to think of something other than the story they told, the predictions they made. "We've always thought of One as Zero and Sigma's, in a way, but he actually made a stand on that last night."

"Oh?" Really? "One did?"

"I should have picked it up from the hints after he was brought in, really. I didn't think that a newbuilt would be asking those questions for a reason other than just trying to understand family. I don't think he accepted the theory so much as just gave up and let us think that way if we were happy." X shook his head, disappointed in himself. "He might have been built at Sigma's orders, but he was very firm that his builder was Dr. Alba, that would make Zero his older sister instead of his mother, and he was _not _Iris' nephew. I think that was the part he was really upset about," X confided in Dr. Cain.

"Why he brought it up after so long." Dr. Cain nodded. "Yes, that's understandable."

"It's not like that, not for us…"

"Or so you say," Dr. Cain interrupted.

X had to laugh. "I know, I know. It's a very hypocritical thing for me to say, and he told me that in no uncertain terms. Family is very important to him." X still hadn't found anyone, and part of that was a vague feeling that, well… He was an android and they were reploids. Father of this species. He felt responsible, really.

"I suppose that if he married Iris he would still be family."

"Isn't Zero family by this point?" Even if Sigma was never cured. "Even if she and Colonel just keep on as they are." Step-daughter, not future daughter-in-law, but still family.

"The one worrying part is, well." Dr. Cain sighed, shifting in his chair, trying to get a little more comfortable. "The fact that family is so important to him."

"The fact his builder is a maverick." X nodded. "He still hasn't come clean about Dragon."

"He may be afraid that we'll take him away if we knew who the little thing came from."

"At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if we should. Dragon may just be what it seems to be." A small dragon, made of silvery green overlapping scales. A mechanaloid with just enough AI to keep One's hair neat. To curl up in a ring around it, like a hair tie, during the day and sleep at a drawer at night. Just enough personality to like shiny things, like the bag of chips of semi-precious stones one of the councilors had brought to reward it for finding her lost engagement ring. Dragon was a bloodhound when it came to shiny things that had fallen behind desks or into other crannies.

She'd opened the bag and sprinkled them down on it, and it had run around, picking up one and looking at it then dropping it when it saw the next one, and the next, the amount of shiny too much for its small mind and attention span.

It could follow a few simple orders, would chase after balls that were thrown for it and roll them back along the ground if trying to grip with its claws would have popped the ball. It could change its configuration enough to fly, or rather glide for short distances, because of how small it was, made of metal or not.

It was small.

_Too _small to have all those functions. To be that bright. It begged the question of how much of a genius its builder must be. What else it might be able to do that it shouldn't, if it could do all that.

"Are we really certain that One knows?" Dr. Cain attempted to argue.

X gave him a sympathetic look. They both knew that was grasping at straws. "He knows. You know how he is about gifts. Especially anything with any resemblance to a stuffed animal." This was an animal, even if it wasn't stuffed. "Or mechanaloid pets." Cutesy little puppies and kittens. "We both know there's no way he would have let some grateful survivor press something like this on him. Not to mention that it's quite clear that it was made for him." For that hair, at least.

"It's just a gift from his builder… which makes it a maverick-built mechanaloid." Hardly something it was safe to have in the base. "At least he lets us scan it constantly." One would practically insist on it, after every mission, making sure Dragon was alright. "If he didn't have some reason to think that it was immune, he wouldn't let it go out with him." And even with that reason, he was still properly paranoid. "It's a security risk," Dr. Cain said, because it was. As much as it would break the boy's heart to have it taken away.

"I don't think so."

"Oh?" Really?

"To be more specific, I don't think it is any more than One is. Or any reploid." Sadly. "We know that Dr. Alba is capable of constructing immune reploids." Well, it wasn't so much that they _knew _as that they really, really hoped so and there was quite a bit of evidence.

Of course, the argument that they hadn't been infected yet, Zero and One, was more circumstantial. They could both be plants, spies, carriers. Theoretically.

"You doubt he'd give something to One that would serve Sigma or make it possible for him to kill One. Unless, of course, the virus has had more time to work on him." They'd tracked some mental decay over time, in Sigma and others.

"He wouldn't want it to do anything that would make us take it away from him. Hopefully not." Dr. Alba had seemed to have some concern for his creation, inferior knockoff or not.

"It's One we have to worry about. What _else _he isn't telling us." In order to keep his small family, and family pet, together. To not rock the boat.

"He doesn't want the mavericks to win. I don't think he'd hold anything important back."

"He's no friend of Sigma's." He was even trying to steal Sigma's ex away from him, set her up with someone better. Funny, how before everyone had considered Zero the evil one, seducing Sigma, and now she was the warrior maiden refusing to be seduced to the dark side in the popular imagination. "Sigma isn't his real father, after all." Which meant Dr. Cain wasn't his real grandfather. Dr. Alba was, and he was still a maverick, but that didn't seem to be why X wanted to do it. "So why do you think that we should take it away, then?"

"To teach One a lesson."

Dr. Cain was taken aback. "That's uncommonly cruel of you."

"A lesson about lies, including lies by omission, and what can happen because of them. He should know by now that inaccurate information kills. I'm not saying we should destroy Dragon, or refuse to give it back once he's explained himself, but I think there needs to be a confrontation about this. The longer we let it go on, the worse it will be." The more he'd fall into the habit of concealing information, the more information he'd be concealing and the more afraid he would be of what would happen if it got out. "He's too used to sidestepping anything he doesn't want to deal with." It was part of his battle tactics, in fact.

"You're recommending a fight to clear the air?"

"Well, we need to do it somehow, before Zero does. I think she's beginning to become a little suspicious about Dragon."

"…Really?" Seriously? Zero was?

"She was… expressing her displeasure about how One and Iris have been stalking her and Colonel, and Iris pressuring her brother to ask Zero out when they're just sparring partners." Normally Zero wasn't open about her feelings, not at all, but occasionally she got upset enough to let her frustration past her reserve, generally while she and X were shooting at each other. "Just because she enjoys fighting with him doesn't mean she's interested, and it's One's fault for stirring up memories of Sigma and Iris aiding the stereotype that female models are all emotional and will fall in love at the drop of a helmet. She's been keeping a much closer eye on One since this started." Normally One didn't make trouble and Zero wasn't exactly social. Except for family interaction and hunter business, they didn't talk much. "She mentioned jewelry and I practically heard her scouting mode click on." Studying an area, zeroing in on everything suspicious and discovering what it meant. Or just killing it.

"Jewelry? Dragon is a rather nice hair ornament." An awesome hair ornament, with sharp pointy teeth. Not that One ever let him fight, but whenever they got dulled Dragon would find something to sharpen them on. "Like a tortoiseshell comb…" There was one in a story about gifts he'd read once, in fact. "Lion and Dragon get along rather well, don't they? Lion would likely be upset if anything happened to it."

"Lion doesn't argue with Zero." Aside from the occasional soulful look or looking put-upon. "If we do this, we'll have to do it tactfully."

"How do you threaten to destroy a boy's pet or accuse him of holding back treasonous secrets tactfully?" Dr. Cain wondered.

"That's what we're going to have to figure out, and quickly, before Zero does it herself." And Zero was good at many things, but tact wasn't one of them.


	7. Chapter 7

_The original intent of this fic was to focus more on the actual Maverick Wars and show that Zero being female wouldn't really change much aside from how people thought of him/her. The issue was that with rare exceptions, characters are male as sort of the default, which is the reason I have that be the default reploid gender (even though really, female is the default gender evolutionarily) while making a character other than the designated love interest female is a deliberate choice that's generally done to invoke various female tropes._

_X-Men First Class is a recent egregious example. A genderflip fic made it painfully obvious how few female characters there were and how cliché their roles were, and really, an expectation that females will be traitors (incl. Moira's memory thing as a precaution)? What? _

_Since male is very obviously the default for Wily's robots, I had to wonder about what it would mean for him to choose to make Zero the exception. _

_And then the fic got cracky and One kind of hijacked it by being cute at me, along with Iris. _

_So, since it was determined to be more a series of scenes than a serious storyline, I thought I'd wrap it up (I've had the first six chapters in my documents folder for well over a year, I'm sure) and get it posted. _

_Of course, there's no reason not to…_

* * *

><p>"I'll go," One said, before Zero had a chance to speak or X enough time to process this.<p>

It wasn't that X hadn't known that launching the shuttle at Eurasia was their backup plan, if they weren't able to recover the components for the cannon. He'd thought they had a shot at that, no pun intended, with the three of them able to split the four targets between them, but One's shield had gotten broken almost immediately after starting the mission and while he'd eventually managed to get the part and limp home, it was too late.

Honestly, X had just been grateful he'd survived. One hadn't felt that way, face bleak when they told him he'd done all of that, endured all that fire for nothing. He'd taken so long that he might as well have aborted the mission right away.

And maybe he should have: it was because Zero was getting two components and One the fourth that X had been able to stay on base after getting the one he'd been sent after and help their engineers try to figure out how to compensate for the strange way space was warping around Eurasia, likely to defend it from just such an attack. Even their best shot would have had a fifty/fifty chance at actually hitting. Otherwise, he could have gone after the fourth component once One aborted the mission and came back to base to report.

X had known that if they sent the shuttle, one of them would have to go up with it. There were only three immune reploids. He'd expected Zero to volunteer, because Zero had always been suicidal and what happened to Iris and Colonel hadn't helped.

He should have known. He should have known that One would feel responsible. That he wouldn't want anyone else to die for his weakness.

No matter how angry One was at Zero, despite the fact the commander of the Eighth and the commander of Unit Zero had barely talked outside of work since Zero had killed Colonel and Iris had attacked her to avenge her brother's death only to fall as well, One wouldn't let even Zero die because One was weak.

The weakest of the three of them, even now. Zero was a purpose-built war machine, X was supposedly a being with infinite potential, but One had been an empty vessel, built to have Zero's superior parts slotted into him. The processor and systems he'd been given as placeholders might have been the work of a genius, but One was a reploid, not an android.

Maybe that was why after all these years, X still thought of him as the child. Even though he was the oldest living reploid aside from mavericks and Signas.

Zero didn't count.

Maybe that was why he had to open his mouth to protest, even though the reasoning was starkly clear.

X might have thought it was funny, if he'd felt like he could ever laugh again. Here he was struck dumb and Zero? She was _furious_. At any other time he might have been relieved that she was acting like this, hair lashing like the tail of an angry cat, stalking around One and finally grabbing him by the throat, trying to shake sense into him even though Zero never got physical with anyone outside of training, even though she had forgotten what those hands had done during the rampage.

If it happened months ago, he would have been glad that One finally shouted at her, "You're not my mother! And you're not my commander anymore, so you have no right to tell me what to do!" X had tried to get them to talk, engineer some scenario that would get two people who were so quiet, possessed such reserve, to open up. Air their feelings before they had any more time to fester.

One was talkative when he was happy, but he hadn't been happy since Iris had died. He'd never been a very confrontational person, and afterwards he'd just… gone quiet. Oh, he'd tried to be cheerful in front of Dr. Cain, because Dr. Cain was dying. After One lost his grandfather as well, X hadn't had the heart to try to confront him about Dragon, the only comfort the boy had left, and Zero had forgotten about the little thing as well.

One avoided what he didn't want to talk about. He clammed up. It would have been better if he'd sent Zero death glares the way those who'd despised her for killing their friends in the rampage had. At least then he would have been expressing those emotions somehow, X thought. And Zero knew how he felt anyway, and she had learned to avoid those people, thinking that she couldn't change their opinions and believing she didn't deserve to. Until the advent of the Maverick Virus changed them for her, Sigma instead of Zero the great monster.

X hadn't known what to say, or do, and Dr. Cain hadn't been there anymore to ask for advice, and now he stood here helplessly, watching them. Knowing that yet another child was going to sacrifice himself to… No, not stop the virus. Merely delay it.

It was hypocritical of him to care more about One than all the soldiers in his unit. All the children that had died since this war started. He still found himself wanting to leave the room, wanting to flee not from One's death or his fight with Zero but X's own _helplessness _in the face of it.

He wanted to volunteer himself, since that was the only way he could think of to get them to stop fighting, unite in order to shout him down for even suggesting that, but this was… This was the sacrifice of a person's life. He couldn't demean that by treating the offer as just a tactic, something to use to manipulate them. He couldn't make that offer unless it was in earnest: to make it when he knew no one would allow him to go was empty. Hollow.

Even more hollow than he felt right now.

He wanted to close his eyes, he wanted to weep, because One was going to _die _and Zero would hate herself even more, take even more insane risks, but he couldn't look away. Not when even the shuttle mission had a deadline, not when Eurasia was looming ever closer, not when he would, he would have to pull Zero off One himself, if that was what it took.

After all, hadn't he decided years ago that he would save this world, even if killing innocent children was the price of letting it live another day? To stop now would make everything, all of it, all the children built only to die have been for nothing. And he could not do that. He just couldn't.

Even if the bloom of virus in the sky meant that One's death had made no difference. Even if Zero striking him when he tried to pull her off made Signas decide to listen to Lifesaver and put her in the brig until either there was time to reexamine her or things got bad enough she had to be sent out anyway. X was actually glad of that last – it was dangerous out there now, even if the virus strengthened Zero, and he'd watched her eyes as One calmly acknowledged the final course corrections, as the command center's screens showed the shuttle's impact with Eurasia.

It was better this way, even if it left Zero even more convinced that she was a monster, even if it meant she was caged in alone, without anyone to comfort her. It was better than her being out there, _wanting _to get shot. At least she'd be alive.

At least X wouldn't lose both of them.

* * *

><p>"You're here? I thought she'd come," X heard, and stiffened.<p>

As he turned around, the voice continued, "All the virus here's dangerous for you, and we both know it just makes her stronger." Yes: both of the other immune hunters had already observed what Lifesaver had recently 'discovered.'

The virus made X dizzy. One rejected it without any effects, good or ill. Zero was empowered by it.

Part of that might not be true anymore.

"…He found a way to revive you," X breathed. "That was why he didn't try to stop the launch." X had thought they'd simply moved too fast for One's creator to act, even to save his youngest child.

One widened his eyes and tilted his head a little, an innocent, childish questioning look that wasn't ruined at all by the darkness around them, the virus' twisted light. That hadn't been ruined by all his years as a hunter. "Oh," One realized. "No. He didn't come up with anything new, not for me. Not when he was so busy. I'm not important enough. Or I wasn't," he corrected himself.

X wished he hadn't spent that time as a doctor now, before joining the hunters. Wished he couldn't connect the dots. Wished it wasn't true. "Can you reject it now?" he asked, or prayed. If One knew that the virus would revive him if he accepted it, or guessed that it might, then it only made sense that he'd insist on being the one to take the risk of piloting the shuttle, right? The shuttle saturated with virus. So he'd let it in, counting on his semi-indulgent creator to let him have a new body, counting on him to let One refuse the virus later and leave with X again, join the Hunters again, just like back then.

Please let that be true.

"I can," One reassured him. "Just like Zero did, when she was revived under the virus' control." And had fought X until she snapped out of it, back during the Second War.

Zero hadn't rejected it right away because she'd been dazed and confused, more berserk than maverick. Like the first time she'd woken up. One was lucid, so why hadn't he rejected it yet? X almost desperately tried to think of some reasonable answer to that. "Does it make you stronger, when you're like this?" That made sense, right? If One fought off the virus now, in the middle of a nest of mavericks, without his shield? They'd have slaughtered him. Being one of them would have kept him safe until someone got here.

One nodded, and X felt grateful, because he knew he'd been grasping at straws. Maybe one of them really was a lifeline. But then One frowned. "Why did _she _make you come? I didn't want you to come here. He wants you dead." 'He' had to be One's creator.

He wanted X dead and not Zero? "Actually, she's still in Medical. She was so upset over what happened to you that I didn't want her to be let out, actually," he confided in One, even though X didn't like that One would probably be happy Zero was so upset. At least it would prove she cared.

Yet One wasn't distracted. "You shouldn't have come," he said, finally seeming actually upset himself, Dragon leaving his hair and climbing down One's arms so One could hold him. "I want to fight _her_, but you… Maybe if you go now, he won't…"

"Fight… Zero? One, no matter how angry you are with her…" During a war? Using the virus to make himself stronger, to make up for the fact he was only a shadow of Zero in so many ways?

"She killed Colonel. And Iris. All of Repliforce died, and they weren't infected. They can't be brought back." If One hadn't been immune, he would have been declared maverick himself for refusing to participate in that war. "And you, and you just let them! What about protecting people! What about Dr. Cain's family! What about, about…. Iris!" Zero's eyes were normally green when she talked to people, blue on the battlefield. That was where she felt at peace, while people stressed her out. One's were normally a calm, untroubled blue when he wasn't fighting, shades of green seeping in only when he was pressed, when he couldn't avoid a confrontation.

Now they were red.

And X wanted to believe that it was the virus' doing. That One's creator had found some way to break One's immunity, break his will. That this wasn't One he was talking too, not really. Another lost child, but he'd already thought One was dead.

Then One clenched his fists for a moment, visibly calming himself, and that color went away. X hadn't seen Zero or One's eyes turn red before. They weren't people who got truly angry, One because that usually wasn't in his nature and Zero because she tended to kill people, or otherwise act, long before the world managed to break through the shield around her heart, the discipline she'd learned to keep herself from going berserk again, from yielding to the monster.

Blue eyes looked into X's green. "I know what he'll say. It's like your brother. He was a good person, but because he fought, other good people suffered. I wonder if they didn't want to fight him, like I don't want to fight you? But, because of that… If it just goes on, and more innocent people die… I know you wouldn't want that. So…"

"One, don't…" Please, don't do this.

"That's not my name. It's just part of my number. DWN Infinity Minus One. And Wily. He didn't give me a personal name, but he gave me that designation, and a family name. I didn't tell you before because they were secrets, and I promised." There was a bit of apology there. "I want to fight Zero. I don't want to fight you. I like you. But if you only fought people you didn't like, you'd never fight anyone, and I'm not… I won't be weak. And if I can subdue you, maybe…"

Maybe Dr. Wily would let X live? Maybe? If One was a good creation, and did what none of the others ever had, not the disobedient robot masters nor the rebellious princess, meant to rule the hive mind of the virus? If he defeated Light's champion? "…Maybe you don't have to die. Like Iris and Colonel and Dr. Cain… I won't lose anyone else!" All the hunters in his unit that had died before they got infected, all the hunters he'd trained with long since gone, design generation after design generation dead and scrap. And X would join them, if Dr. Wily's remnant had his way. Or Sigma got lucky. Or Zero just killed him, like she had Iris and Colonel even though Colonel had admired her so much and Iris had liked her! Even though they were friends, like Zero and X!

Despite One's determination, despite the fact Dr. Wily hadn't replaced his metal shield because One (X didn't have any other name for him) could use the virus as a shield now, X still knew who would win after the first ten seconds.

Because One _was _using it as a shield.

He could have used it to swamp X, dizzy him, make him unable to fight or resist. He didn't. He just shot at him, and X knew One knew, even if he didn't seem to be thinking of it consciously, which of them was the master of the buster. Oh, he tried his shield bash move a few times, but not as much as he would have with his normal shield. And that move was much better against larger mavericks than against X, anyway. X was far more agile than most animal reploids. Than most reploids, period.

One was fighting defensively, trying to wear X down without hurting him. He didn't want to kill X, and it showed.

X didn't want to kill him, either. But he never wanted to kill _anyone_, so he'd learned long ago how not to let that stop him. How to keep from hesitating. How to kill, even though he hated it with every strut in his frame.

And if this wouldn't really kill One, then… Then X couldn't tell himself that this would free him from the virus, but it would let X stop Sigma. It might give One time to come to his senses. So he fought.

So, in the end, he cradled that head in his lap. "One… I'm sorry," he said, and it was apparent he knew it was inadequate. So much to apologize for.

"No, it's… Okay. One was… a nice name."

"What should I call you?" Because what he wanted to be called, who he would be, should be up to One. That was the point of X and those derived from them. Even if so many had that choice taken from them, X wouldn't be the one to do it.

The boy looked distant for a moment, abstracted yet focusing. "One's… fine." The glow faded.

It took X a minute to realize that the glow had faded, the virus was gone, and One was _still alive_. That hadn't been some mark of his passing, a sign he'd left his body. "You…"

"Iris… can't come back anymore," One said, and tried to move the arm that had fingers: he didn't have enough control anymore to turn his buster arm back into a hand.

"Try to rest. Communications are down, they don't have to…" know that you attacked me, that you gave into the virus for even a moment, X would have said, if he hadn't been shot, the blast passing right through his torso, his armor unable to protect him or the dying child.

Sigma's laugh and Zero's scream of rage (when had she gotten here? How long had she stood there watching?) faded. He thought he heard a voice like his father's, but it faded like a human's dream after X woke up again.

One didn't.

* * *

><p>…<em>have the fic return to a mood fitting in more with X series, in the end. X5 is the point I write a lot of AU scenarios at, but in-verse it's kind of where AU scenarios go to die, since there are all these different tracks that all end up to about the same bleak ending, and by Zero series it's all literally the same outcome anyway. <em>

_Yes, the com should have been on during that scene, but I didn't want to deal with the complications of having Alia, Signas and Lifesaver in the conversation. It's an AU to begin with. (So please don't sue me, Capcom.)_

_The title is from _The Firebrand, _by Marion Zimmer Bradley. There's a quote at the beginning about Queen Hecuba, mother of Paris, who, "dreamt she gave birth to a firebrand, who burnt down the walls of Troy." _

_An annoying trope is Female Success is Family, and female characters tend to get sidelined in favor of male ones in general. So in the end, I ended up doing a bit of commentary on how people treat female characters, instead of sticking with the plan of having Zero play exactly the same role in the fic as in canon. I've given One a passive personality, when I write him, in order to avoid having him steal the spotlight. He was specifically constructed to not really be that kind of character, but more of a sidekick type that acts as a plot device/support for the more important characters around him. Here, though, he's ended up clinging to Dr. Wily and Iris' memory instead of seeing X and Zero as his parental figures._

_No, by the way, this is not an X/Zero fic. They actually have less chemistry than in canon, due to X having Zero in that 'potential daughter-in-law with mental health issues' slot instead of 'sempai/trainer that I can rely on when I need help' slot. My Xmuse just isn't attracted to people he doesn't see as equals. And dating his son's sort-of-ex? He might be old, but he'd rather not be a creepy old man._

_I could spend more time on how Zero is _not _going to want to work with Axl at all, because he is young and cares about his family and obviously doomed doomed doomed, but I decided to wrap this up with a depressing finale because it's an X series fic. _


End file.
